Wikitravel:Guide for business owners

Welcome, business owners. Wikitravel does not discriminate against the owners of hotels, restaurants, bars, and other travel services. Everyone is invited to share truthful information that helps others in their travels. Everyone is also invited share the information in Wikitravel with whomever they want. Of course, we do have some guidelines, policies, and a few legal requirements that go along with this.

Contribute

Go ahead and add a listing for your business. The key guideline is: "Don't tout." Save the sales pitch and just tell it like it is. You don't have to stick to a dry recitation of facts, but Travelers aren't fools. They'll see through the flowery descriptions and effusive praise, and they won't trust it. They'll distrust your listing, and they'll also come to distrust Wikitravel in general, which isn't good for you or the rest of us.

One thing was ask you not to do is to remove information about your competitors. Even if they break every rule on the don't-tout page, don't remove or edit it yourself. Instead point it out to another Wikitravel editor, and let them do it, so everyone knows it was done fairly.

Share

Wikitravel is licensed under a "copyleft" license that allows its content to be use by anyone, free of charge, for any legal purpose. The license is called "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike". The "attribution" part says we have to give credit to the people who contributed the information. The "share-alike" part says that anything contributed to Wikitravel has to be made available to everyone else, under the same terms. That means that if you are a hotel owner, and you want to provide a guide to the city to the people staying with you, you can print copies and put them in each room. (We specifically didn't include the "non-commercial" limitation in Wikitravel's licence, so that businesses could do this.) The only restrictions on you are the same ones that apply to Wikitravel itself: you have to give credit to the contributors, and anyone you give this information to has the same right to redistribute it.